I raised my son Winston as a feminist – however ladies deal with him as poisonous

My son Winston has always adored and respected girls. He invited the whole of his Year 5 class to his 10th birthday party because he liked them so much, at an age when his male peers were generally shunning the opposite sex.

And at the end of his co-ed secondary school, he concluded that he was glad he’d had so many girl mates because they were so much more mature than he was. His self-awareness pleased me. Being a feminist through and through, I devoted myself to parenting Winston and his older sister equally, bringing them up to think of themselves as equal in their ambitions and self-belief. Winston always had rewarding friendships with girls at school as a result. Now 21, he’s at university, reading international relations, and arrived looking forward to studying alongside young women — and men — as intellectually curious and open-minded as he is.

But a rude awakening awaited my poor son. Not only is there an arcane set of rules to which young men now have to adhere in the dating world, but in general he is treated as toxic simply for being male.

In any political debate he has with a girl, at some point she will say, ‘That’s just the patriarchy talking,’ or, ‘You’re a man, you understand nothing.’

Culturally, he is finding that if he shows agency of any sort, he could be accused of asserting oppressive ‘male, pale, stale’ entitlement.

‘No matter how much I might be trying to contribute to the solution,’ he tells me, ‘I’m seen as just part of the problem.’

And it makes me boil with rage. I’m angry with my own sex. I know that men have had it their way for centuries, but why do we women have to descend to that same unevolved view that one gender has to be on top?

But I’m angry with myself, too. I did my best to raise my son to be fair-minded but failed to warn him that the scales had tipped.

I failed to harden him and teach him how to speak up for himself in a time and a world in which he is presumed guilty before being proven innocent.

For make no mistake, feminism has turned colder: gone are the days of the cheerful female celebration and triumphs of my youth.

I have been a feminist since I was about 12, when my mother got a high-powered job at the Independent Broadcasting Authority (the equivalent of Ofcom today) — and I saw how incredulous many of her acquaintances were that she’d been trusted with such responsibility.

I then worked in the House of Commons in my 20s, where I cheered on women in politics smashing the glass ceiling without any quotas to give them a leg-up.

But today, rightly horrified by the #MeToo revelations — with their twin evils of male abuse of power, and sex — and the regressive overturning of abortion rights in the U.S., young women have come to see men as the arch enemy.

‘The patriarchy’ is seen as a monster that must be crushed at all costs. And Winston and his peers are caught in the slipstream.

Blameless young men trying to get it right are required to be deferential and passive if they wish to be seen as an ally by women. For Winston this means dialling down his natural ebullience in favour of the new male meekness.

Deferential and passive does not come naturally to anyone in our family. Twenty-seven years ago, I asked my now husband what his next move was in the backgammon game we were playing.

In an attempt to show his interest, he leapt up and said ‘This is!’ while sweeping the board aside, pulling me into his arms and kissing me. These days he could get in trouble for that — but three months later, we were engaged.

The dynamic couldn’t be more different now. At uni raves, Winston says, it is understood by all that it must be the woman who comes on to the man.

‘I have to tread a very fine line,’ he tells me. ‘I can look flirtily at a girl for no more than a moment: any longer and I could be accused of staring, of objectifying.

‘It’s as if, just by being a man, I’m predatory until proven otherwise. So I glance at her, and only if she responds strongly and positively for more than a few seconds back, do I dare go over to her and ask if she’d like a drink.’

I note, however, that the old sexism that says the boy has to pay for the girl’s drink clearly still stands.

We had had family discussions about consent so he is able to navigate confusing signals well enough. And he did get a taste of the new order when at school he fell foul of the strange omerta that said you couldn’t kiss a girl who had only just broken up with her boyfriend, even if she wanted to.

Luckily, on that occasion, he had some redoubtable girl mates who were able to broker peace between all parties, so balance was restored. But his older sister was withering: ‘You’re an idiot. Just follow the rules.’

Still, that was nothing compared with what he’s found at university. Friends of his have been ostracised by their peers for being ‘too pushy’, and only slowly rehabilitated when the girl in question admits that she may have exaggerated the wrongdoing in question.

Making your interest in a woman obvious may be verboten, but a girl grinding backwards into my son’s groin is an acceptable expression of her interest in him.

Winston admits he’s been lucky enough to pick his way through that minefield.

One young woman who made the first move with him on the dancefloor is now his (lovely) girlfriend so they laugh about that, while acknowledging if he had done the same, she would have run a mile.

My daughter, now 23, and her boyfriend had a similar start — she asked him to kiss her after he failed to take her up on her signals. He admits he was scared stiff of getting it wrong and didn’t want to wreck the friendship they already had.

All of them have confided how glad they are that, safely partnered up, they are out of the gladiator’s arena of sexual politics with all its skewed rules and taboos. But there is a tacit consensus among them that girlfriends wear the trousers in any relationship.

Is that any wonder when, increasingly in culture too, women need to be ‘above’ men; men must be belittled, cancelled or taken out of the running entirely.

In the 2016 novel The Power by Naomi Alderman, recently turned into a big-budget drama on Amazon Prime, women get the power to rule the world — and do so by taking the planet back to the Stone Age and stamping men almost out of existence.

And of course there was last year’s blockbuster Barbie movie and its simplistic view that all men are useless and that there is no place for them in a world rightly ruled only by women. Yes, it’s pink, plastic and a parody but what are young men supposed to think? Meanwhile, watch virtually any film starring Adam Sandler, recently named the highest-paid movie star on the planet, and see how he has profited from making films that glorify male immaturity and ineptitude. In the UK, employment prospects for young men, both black and white, compared with young women’s, have never been worse.

That’s despite the fact that in 2022 a YouGov poll for charity Future Men found that 40 per cent of young UK men feel that society still expects them to be the breadwinner.

So how to solve that conundrum and earn enough cash in a market where your masculinity holds you back? Simple: downplay that masculinity.

That’s a lesson Winston is learning even before he properly enters the world of work. A few months ago, he was scouted as a model on the street by a female talent scout, only to be told regretfully that her boss had said he was ‘too male’ in a sector where effete fits better.

A top headhunter told me that from the young male graduates he sees trying to enter the workplace, it is the gentler, quieter, more obviously empathic men who are succeeding.

‘You might want to tell Winston to tone down his cheeky-chappy persona,’ he said.

‘He needs to be more metrosexual to fit in.’ Yet again he has been asked to dilute himself (in a way we would abhor if a woman was asked to change how she is) and this saddens me.

These new rules are ultimately bad for women too, because they’re just not natural. And nature abhors a vacuum, so into the space left by the death of acceptable masculinity comes the return of the caveman.

In the U.S., they have the rednecks of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and the anti-abortionists; over here, it’s the likes of self-confessed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.

Even Winston, who despises Tate, admits that some of the things Tate says about men reclaiming their power can resonate with him and his friends when they feel forgotten or left behind by society (as 29 per cent of young men admitted to feeling, in that 2022 YouGov survey).

This is a truly horrifying thought.

In a world where polarisation seems to be more attractive than ever, I fear a backlash.

A plunge of the seesaw back to the other side — and what our young men will have to become to achieve this is a frightening thought.

Surely true equality is the only way to prevent this. We must accept that men don’t need to be smashed down to raise women up.

Mothers like me should teach our sons respect for women, yes, but for themselves, too. Empowering women is obviously the way ahead — but why must we drown men in our wake?